Help With Fancy Holiday Email In Lieu Of Holiday Cards

[cool7hand]

Hi!

Long time lurker, first time poster! My wife and I have gone full-blown mustachian!

We would like to replace our paper and snail mail holiday cards with a fancy pants do-it-yourself email.

Like most mustachians, my wife and I are pretty cool. We are addicted to freshwater bass fishing. We like to share pictures of our biggest fish catches of the prior year to celebrate how life is about experience, not stuff. We also like to entertain our family and friends with fun, alternate holiday jingles, such as "la la la la la, la la la largemouth". This year we want to use an email via Gmail, or Outlook and another provider, because it is cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

Are there any friendly mustachians who have done something similar who could point us to a website or share a quick how to? I am talking about the ability to embed the pictures with a more fancy presentation. Maybe some graphics. Possibly a public domain (and terrible) fishing song? We would be most appreciative!

Thanks!!

[CestMoi]

First, it can be done in raw HTML code in Notepad++ and then cut and pasted into Outlook and sent that way. You may also use Word to design the html email, then bring it into Outlook. Email clients all have different interpretations of HTML, and Word is notorious for adding their own special "Word" code, so you may have to expect some inconsistencies.

https://group-mail.com/html-email/how-to-create-html-email-with-microsoft-word/

There's also a free email creation software called OpenEmm. It's not very intuitive, but if you're feeling ambitious, give it a try.

[SimpleCycle]

We do this - but our "email" is a PDF attached to a personal email for each recipient, akin to the note we'd write on an actual card.  The PDF is the "card" part with photos and a message.  I use Mail Merge with Attachments plug in to Google Sheets.  It limits you to 50 emails per day in the free version, but that just means sending in two batches for us.

[CloserToFree]

Let us know if you figure something out that works well! Thinking about this too, but we may end up doing paper cards for one more season, especially if I can find a great deal. (Last year we did business postcards via Vistaprint per Mrs. Frugalwoods' suggestion, but I think I heard you can do them even cheaper via Costco or Amazon prints so am going to look into that.)